for a higher or lower degree of probability for our state of affairs, with which, if probability-levels become high enough, a firm judgement is usually associated” (LI, § 6, 17). If knowledge is tied to truth, then it becomes clear that truth is nothing but the idea that will guide our search for knowledge (LI, § 6, 18).53
Hence, as Husserl stresses, the claim that “as far as their theoretical content is concerned [, . . .] logic is related to psychology just as any branch of chemical technology is related to chemistry, [or] as land-surveying is to geometry etc.[,]” is absurd (LI, § 17, 40).54 It is, rather, the other way around: logic is the foundation that supplies the formal laws of judgment to sciences that deal with the empirical world,55 in the same way that geometry, although originally derived from land-surveying, now grounds it.
It is worth underscoring Husserl’s critique of causal justification of formal laws of logic in the manner of natural laws. To highlight the mistake of attributing to hypothetical natural laws the status of formal apodictic laws, he cites Lipps again:
The rules, therefore, on which one must proceed in order to think rightly, are merely rules on which one must proceed in order to think as the nature of thought, its specific lawfulness, demands. They are, in short, identical with the natural laws of thinking itself. Logic is a physics of thinking or it is nothing at all.56
As already noted, Husserl is critical of Lipps, who explains logic as being determined by our psychological makeup. As Husserl says, in the claim just cited, Lipps already uses the formal law of causation—the specific lawfulness of thinking—to explain his assertion about “the nature of thought.” Our judgment that one event proceeds from another already presupposes the formal law of causation. It is not the case that the rules of our thinking are the thinking itself. To put it differently, this is the metabasis, pointed out by Husserl, that erroneously reduces the rules of thinking to the thinking itself.
The case of the archaic Greeks might serve as an explanation. Fire, for example, can be explained by recourse to myth: “One day someone went into the forest and was given a burning log by one of the gods.” Fire is then explained by mythical powers and there is no need to look for other justification. Myth provides all: “cause,” “effect,” and “reasons” in one package; the story that is told. Everything is as it always was.57 The idea of reasoning in the form of validation—that is, providing reasons for our assertions—is antithetic to mythical thinking.
For the ancient philosophers, the mythical explanation was “unscientific.” Likewise, in our time, to assert something means that we also give reasons, so that it can be seen why something is the case or why it is not. Without justification presented in the form of reasoning, there is no recourse to an understanding that others can follow. Why should they believe our claims? So we give reasons as to why there is fire: yet, in offering reasons for fire, we already presuppose the principle of causality; that is, the formal law that every consequent has its antecedent, which explains it. Or, more simply, the notion that every cause has its effect, and that we can understand certain events according to those that preceded them.
Plato considered “why” something is or is not when he recounted Socrates’ explanation to Phaedo: “When I was a young man I was wonderfully keen on that wisdom which they call natural science, for I thought splendid to know the causes of everything, why it comes to be, why it perishes and why it exists.”58 However, Aristotle was the first to formalize this line of thinking. From our empirical encounters with the world, Aristotle abstracted the four formal causes that became the basis for our understanding. His four causes were derived from the experience of things that the Greeks encountered in their everyday living,59 and they referred back to it.60 In other words, the four causes explained experience a priori.
After Aristotle, to understand things in the world is to search for the four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. Without knowing these causes, we cannot claim to know the existence and nature of the thing. By searching for causes, we are looking for a “why” in terms of antecedents. Senses—that is, experience—as Aristotle explains, “do not tell the ‘why’ of anything—e.g. why fire is hot; they only say that it is hot.”61 To not ask why is to not seek a cause. (Gods gave us fire: there is nothing more to it.) By contrast, we search for causes to understand why something comes onto being; as Plato says, “why it perishes and why it exists.” We seek reasons that we can give for our opinions, thereby validating them. For Aristotle, then, “wisdom is knowledge about certain principles and causes.” In short, if we seek knowledge, then “we must inquire of what kind are the causes and the principles.” Only then can we reach knowledge, which is, for Aristotle, wisdom.62
For us moderns, Aristotle’s explanation of the four causes seems strange. Our understanding has been shaped by the universal law of causality based on the mathematical hypothesis that stipulates that “every occurrence in ‘nature’—idealized nature—must come under exact laws” (Crisis, 53). This modern idea of causality is Galilean: only in the Galilean universe, our universe, does the hypothesis of perfect causality become a general law that supposedly “rules” all processes in the world. As Husserl notes: “With Galileo, then, begins the surreptitious substitution of idealized nature for prescientifically intuited nature” (Crisis, § 9h, 49–50). The law of causality governs the heavenly bodies, pendulums, rocks, and atoms. Since that historical time, a description of events that follow each other and that we encounter in the world is transformed into mathematical language and formalized as the law of causality. Its abstract formula ensures its validity and it is now considered a priori: prior to our scientific explanation of the world.
In connection with the four causes, as already noted, Aristotle’s theory applies to the world of our living. The same applies mutatis mutandis to Aristotle’s logic. Aristotle’s logic is not “pure” logic in the sense we understand it today. Husserl observes that “Aristotle relates his analytics to the real world,” thus his analytics contain “the categories of reality” (FTL, § 12, 49). So, Husserl notes, the Aristotelian formal system is not free of the things we encounter in the life-world, because Aristotle’s system “lacked formal ontology.” Strictly speaking, Aristotle was not aware, or rather did not recognize, that “formal ontology is intrinsically prior to the ontology of realities” (FTL, § 26, 80). His system is not reduced to a formal “anything-whatever.” The same applies to the Euclidean geometry: for Euclid, geometry was a “theory of intuited world-space” (FTL, § 29, 92).
Husserl points out that the Aristotelian and Euclidian systems do not, or, rather, cannot, account for the difference between things in the world and the objects in general that populate today’s domain of formal ontology. Formal ontology is essentially about “regarding the judgment sphere theoretically as a specific Objective field of apriori ideality, just as the geometer regards the sphere of pure geometrical shapes and the arithmetician regards the sphere of numbers” (FTL, § 26, 81). And it is exactly this confusion between formal ontology and the world in which we live that was to occupy Husserl in his last years.
ANTHROPOLOGISM
Husserl’s critique of psychologism applies, mutatis mutandis, to anthropologism. Anthropologism is for Husserl also a form of relativism (FTL, § 24, 76). The underlying claim of anthropologism is that what is true or false depends on our species. There might be other species and they might judge differently. What is true for us might be false for them.
As Husserl explains, this misconception is already based on our understanding of true and false; it is based on our categorization of judgment. Further, to use the true/false distinction and then claim that it might be different for other species means that we do not understand the meaning of true and false. There is also another problem. If we say that truth for a different species might be nonexistent, which means that there would be no truth per se, then this
